Getting into Clojure (and other stuff)

With the recent changes at Adobe I was more and more thinking that I need to further diversify what I’m doing. That was already happening in 2010 and 2011 quite a lot – client demand for Flash and Flex solutions decreased (and still is decreasing) and we found ourselves doing more and more Javascript-based applications. Quite often those would include jQuery or other frameworks, more recently also involve mobile technologies such as jQuery Mobile or jqTouch. There’s nothing wrong with that as such – things and technologies change over time.

I don’t want to go into rant-mode (again) and start elaborating on why Adobe has made such a fool of themselves with their handling on the November-of-2011-layoffs-and-technology-decisions, you’re free to form your own opinions – there are lots of pieces on Flash Mobile, Flex, layoffs and various communication disasters around there.

But those (and some other events I really don’t want to talk about at this time and place) sent a clear message: Further diversification is needed, even if Apache Flex turns out to be the most successful thing in the world and there would be further demand for it and even if I was to become the most awesome JS coder ever and even if Adobe ColdFusion was a viable product for the rest of all times.

Back from uni and various toying-around with Haskell and Erlang I had an existing interest in Clojure. The other day I had an email conversation with my friend Sean Corfield about something CFML-related when we got into talking about Clojure. I had noticed before that Sean was doing more and more with Clojure and was quite active on Twitter when it came to this topic. Anyway – I decided to have a look into Clojure and I really like it so far. It’s basically a Lisp-dialect for the JVM (with ports to target MSFT’s CLR and Javascript).

As Sean had shared a few interesting links and books to get started with me, I thought I’ll pass the info on and make it available for others who’d be interested in getting into Clojure.

The author of the latter, Amit Rathore, is also running an online course “Introduction to Clojure” starting on January 30th via codelesson.com. I have signed up for it because it looks really, really interesting and a good way to get up to speed even faster than by playing around as I do now. Finally – there’s Clojure/West in March in San Jose. If everything goes according to my plan, I’ll be there!

That’s not all though, I do realise that Clojure is at this stage just another niche technology. There’ll be more news, updates and further plans coming in this blog as soon as I find the time to write about them.